02Jan08a Book review - Heins (Tom)

Review (by Tom)

Not In Front Of The Children: Indecency, Censorship, and the Innocence of Youth

Marjorie Heins; Hill & Wang; New York; 2001

Facing a trial for importing allegedly indecent material, I thought this book might provide useful insights into the legal concept of indecency, especially as the term concerns and affects children. There are indeed a great many nuggets of interest lying here and there through the text but the Americocentric narrative will be of interest mainly to First Amendment lawyers.

The main issue is the constant legal battle between conservatives trying to keep alleged indecency such as swearwords off the airwaves, the internet etc, and liberals (or call it media interests plus artists pushing at the boundaries) protesting against the mass media being reduced to one long children's hour. Much of the argument turns on the supposed effects of allegedly indecent material on children but there is also a lot about claims by and behalf of young people to First Amendment rights for their own expression and access to serious culture and sex education.

Outright pornography, even of the milder kind, is not a central theme for this author, whose claim to expertise in First Amendment issues is rooted in her work as a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union. As well as reviewing the legal struggle as it has developed in over a century from early obscenity law in the US right up to the v-chip, she also introduces competing theoretical claims for the influence of the arts and controversial speech, starting with the opposing ideas of Plato and Aristotle and the ways in which modern science has attempted to put theories to the test.

The so-called Harry Met Sally case, one of the relatively few instances in which pornography and sex offending surface as issues in the book, neatly encapsulates the way things tend to work in the law courts, not just in America but also in the UK and quite a few other countries with which Heins makes comparisons. Harry Met Sally got its name from the simulated sounds of a woman reaching orgasm in the film When Harry Met Sally but was in fact about a legal challenge to signal-bleed allegedly emanating from the Playboy TV channel. It was claimed that children could hear sex sounds and occasionally see bits of naughty action from a signal that was supposed to be scrambled except for paying subscribers with access rights.

Prof Richard Green, now at Cambridge University, whose name will be familiar to regular followers of Ipce discussions, testified in the 1998 trial that none of the available scientific evidence supports the notion that exposure to sexual explicitness is psychologically harmful to youth. It is actually quite rare for courts even to listen to such testimony. It is even rarer for them to take pay serious attention to it and, sadly, this was to be no exception. As Heins puts it, the court made little mention of Greens testimony but did draw attention to one sentence of a more cautious nature he had written in a book 24 years earlier before most of the evidence he would had cited had been published in the scientific journals.

Playboy eventually won in the Supreme Court because the evidence for signal-bleed was very weak. It is no surprise that a big-money outfit such as Playboy would eventually win the day but the case is nonetheless an instructive one as regards the as yet very limited power of science as an agent of change in the sexual arena.

Heins does an excellent job although a summary chart of cases and their outcomes would have been helpful. In its absence is hard for anyone but the most diligent reader to see the wood for the trees. There is an index and over a hundred pages of notes and references but it is still not easy for a selective reader to track down a topic of particular interest. So far as Ipce members are concerned, the book will be of interest to those with a particular concern for young peoples First Amendment rights and anyone wanting to catch up on how politicians have made fools of themselves over technological change that is moving too fast for them, as exemplified in the absurdities of net filtering.